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From The Washington Post:
Russian billionaire Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska has been indicted on a charge of sanctions evasion, part of an ongoing effort by the Justice Department to hold wealthy Russians with ties to Vladimir Putin accountable for violating U.S. laws as Russia’s war in Ukraine rages on.
Deripaska’s indictment was unsealed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan and also names three other defendants accused of participating in his efforts to skirt sanctions that were imposed on him in 2018 when he was slapped with economic sanctions by the U.S. government for acting on behalf of a Russian official and for operating in Russia’s energy sector.
The oligarch allegedly used an intermediary, Olga Shriki, to facilitate his $3 million sale of a music studio in California. Shriki, a New Jersey resident, is in custody while Deripaska and the others remain at large. His girlfriend, Ekaterina Olegovna Voronia, was charged with making false statements to officials when she traveled to the United States to give birth to their child.
www.washingtonpost.com/… (Paywall)
You may remember Deripaska as the Russian oligarch with whom Paul Manafort was sharing Trump campaign information back in 2016. From Axios:
Manafort hired and worked closely with Russian national Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the committee definitively calls a “Russian intelligence officer” that served as a liaison between him and Deripaska.
…
“Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” the committee wrote.
Deripaska is also the guy with whom Mitch McConnell arranged to build a massive, job-producing aluminum plant in Kentucky, in 2019. That plan eventually fizzled out.
Regardless, Deripaska is about as close to Putin as one can be. As cited above, Deripaska has his finger in all the big U.S. treason pies of at least the last half decade. So…good move by the DOJ. They may never get their hands on him, but he will be persona non grata in the USA for the rest of his days.
Buh-bye.